Controlling Upstart job as unprivileged user

Question

What's the best way to allow an unprivileged user to control an upstart job?

By controlling an upstart job I mean starting/stopping/reloading/restarting it:

start myservice 

I can imagine one way to go about it is through sudo; what needs to be done to make this possible? Are there other/better ways?

NB: This question, while similarly named, is very different from Running upstart jobs as unprivileged users, as that one deals with the execution of the actual service instead of the controlling of the job.

Answer 1

You certainly can control the jobs with sudo. You don't need anything special, just sudo start myservice etc. It is the preferred way if you have sudo rights.

Beyond that, you need some mapper running as root to convert your user privileged commands into root commands. I've once done this for a special purpose with a FIFO, that is writeable by user, read by an root privileged upstart script which then maps the commands into start, stop and so on. Certainly not a secure way to do it for a multi-user/production systems.